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The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an interconnected and tightly coupled globalized world in rapid change. This article sets the scientific stage for understanding and responding to such change for global sustainability and resilient societies. We provide a systemic overview of the current situation where people and nature are dynamically intertwined and embedded in the biosphere, placing shocks and extreme events as part of this dynamic; humanity has become the major force in shaping the future of the Earth system as a whole; and the scale and pace of the human dimension have caused climate change, rapid loss of biodiversity, growing inequalities, and loss of resilience to deal with uncertainty and surprise. Taken together, human actions are challenging the biosphere foundation for a prosperous development of civilizations. The Anthropocene reality— of rising system-wide turbulence—calls for transformative change towards sustainable futures. Emerging technologies, social innovations, broader shifts in cultural repertoires, as well as a diverse portfolio of active stewardship of human actions in support of a resilient biosphere are highlighted as essential parts of such transformations.

Fishers worldwide operate in an environment of uncertainty and constant change. Their ability to manage risk associated with such uncertainty and subsequently adapt to change is largely a function of individual circumstances, including their access to different fisheries. However, explicit attention to the heterogeneity of fishers' connections to fisheries at the level of the individual has been largely ignored. We illustrate the ubiquitous nature of these connections by constructing a typology of commercial fishers in the state of Maine based on the different fisheries that fishers rely on to sustain their livelihoods and find that there are over 600 combinations. We evaluate the adaptive potential of each strategy, using a set of attributes identified by fisheries experts in the state, and find that only 12% of fishers can be classified as being well positioned to adapt in the face of changing socioeconomic and ecological conditions. Sensitivity to the uneven and heterogeneous capacity of fishers to manage risk and adapt to change is critical to devising effective management strategies that broadly support fishers. This will require greater attention to the social-ecological connectivity of fishers across different jurisdictions.

Sustainability within planetary boundaries requires concerted action by individuals, governments, civil society and private actors. For the private sector, there is concern that the power exercised by transnational corporations generates, and is even central to, global environmental change. Here, we ask under which conditions transnational corporations could either hinder or promote a global shift towards sustainability. We show that a handful of transnational corporations have become a major force shaping the global intertwined system of people and planet. Transnational corporations in agriculture, forestry, seafood, cement, minerals and fossil energy cause environmental impacts and possess the ability to influence critical functions of the biosphere. We review evidence of current practices and identify six observed features of change towards ‘corporate biosphere stewardship’, with significant potential for upscaling. Actions by transnational corporations, if combined with effective public policies and improved governmental regulations, could substantially accelerate sustainability efforts. Transnational corporations control large proportions of the industries and commodities that directly and indirectly impact the environment. Here, the authors discuss the problems, but also potential benefits, of such consolidation for sustainability.

Humanity faces increasingly intractable environmental problems characterized by high uncertainty, complexity, and swift change. Natural resource governance must therefore involve continuous production and use of new knowledge to adapt to highly complex, rapidly changing social-ecological systems to ensure long-term sustainable development. Bridging and boundary organizations have been proposed as potentially powerful means of achieving these aims by promoting cooperation among actors from the science, policy, and management sectors. However, despite substantial investments of time, capital, and human resources, little agreement exists about definitions and measures of knowledge production and how this is achieved in bridging organizations and there is only meager understanding of how knowledge production and its use are shaped by social interactions, socio-political environments, and power relations. New concepts, methods, and metrics for conceptualizing and measuring learning in support of natural resource governance and testing the conditions under which it can be achieved are therefore badly needed. This paper presents an attempt at a holistic framework to address this, drawing on theory, methods, and metrics from three research areas: knowledge utilization, boundary organizations, and stakeholder theory. Taken together, these provide a solid conceptual and methodological toolkit for conducting cross-case comparisons aimed at understanding the social environmental conditions under which learning in such organizations does and does not occur. We use empirical data to show how the framework can be applied and discuss some of the practical considerations and important challenges that emerge. We close with a general discussion and an agenda for future research to promote discussion around the topic of how to erect systematic comparisons of learning in support of adaptive natural resource governance as it occurs in bridging organizations.

The dynamics that drive SSFs and their observed social, economic and environmental outcomes tend to be a complex mix of endogenous factors, such as over-fishing and conflict over resources, and external pressures such as climate change and international demand for seafood. Recognizing That SSFs are Embedded Within Global Markets One set of papers in this Research Topic heeds the call to explore new approaches, concepts, and methods including the under-examined market connections between small-scale fisheries and global markets, ecosystem-based management and diagnosing and monitoring fisheries. [...]trophic models of the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) type and Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK), have been widely applied for fisheries assessment and management. [...]a balance must be struck between artisanal livelihoods, industrial-scale fishing and conservation of fishery resources through the consideration of both ecological and social objectives.

Reliance on international seafood markets leaves small-scale fishers and fishing economies vulnerable to distant disturbances that can negatively affect market prices and trigger social, economic, and environmental crises at local levels. This paper examines the role of seafood trade routes and re-exports in masking such market linkages. We employ a network approach to map the global trade routes of lobster (Homarus spp.) from small-scale producers in North America to terminal markets and evaluate the extent to which intermediary nations act to obscure producer-market relationships. In taking this approach, we provide a method for systematically measuring 'teleconnectivity' created through seafood trade routes, and thus making explicit vulnerabilities to small-scale fisheries from this teleconnectivity. Our empirical analysis shows that the perceived trade diversification of lobster producers is masking increased dependencies on a reduced number of end-markets, particularly in Asia. These results suggest, paradoxically, that the apparent diversification of trade partnerships may actually amplify, rather than reduce, the vulnerabilities of small-scale fishers associated with international trade by making risk harder to identify and anticipate. We discuss our results in the context of local fisheries and global seafood trade and describe key impediments to being able to monitor market dependencies and exposure to potential vulnerabilities.

Blue foods, sourced in aquatic environments, are important for the economies, livelihoods, nutritional security and cultures of people in many nations. They are often nutrient rich 1 , generate lower emissions and impacts on land and water than many terrestrial meats 2 , and contribute to the health 3 , wellbeing and livelihoods of many rural communities 4 . The Blue Food Assessment recently evaluated nutritional, environmental, economic and justice dimensions of blue foods globally. Here we integrate these findings and translate them into four policy objectives to help realize the contributions that blue foods can make to national food systems around the world: ensuring supplies of critical nutrients, providing healthy alternatives to terrestrial meat, reducing dietary environmental footprints and safeguarding blue food contributions to nutrition, just economies and livelihoods under a changing climate. To account for how context-specific environmental, socio-economic and cultural aspects affect this contribution, we assess the relevance of each policy objective for individual countries, and examine associated co-benefits and trade-offs at national and international scales. We find that in many African and South American nations, facilitating consumption of culturally relevant blue food, especially among nutritionally vulnerable population segments, could address vitamin B 12 and omega-3 deficiencies. Meanwhile, in many global North nations, cardiovascular disease rates and large greenhouse gas footprints from ruminant meat intake could be lowered through moderate consumption of seafood with low environmental impact. The analytical framework we provide also identifies countries with high future risk, for whom climate adaptation of blue food systems will be particularly important. Overall the framework helps decision makers to assess the blue food policy objectives most relevant to their geographies, and to compare and contrast the benefits and trade-offs associated with pursuing these objectives. A study proposes four ways in which foods sourced in aquatic environments can contribute to healthier, more environmentally sustainable and equitable food systems, and examines the relevance of these ambitions to nations.

Marine ecosystem science has developed since the 1940s, when humans obtained the ability to spend substantial time underneath the surface of the ocean. Since then, and drawing on several decades of scientific advances, a number of exciting research frontiers have emerged. We find: Understanding interacting drivers of change, Identifying thresholds in ecosystems, and Investigating social-ecological dynamics to represent particularly interesting frontiers, which we speculate will soon emerge as new mainstreams in marine ecosystem science. However, increasing human impacts on ecosystems everywhere and a new level of global connectivity are shifting the context for studying, understanding, and managing marine ecosystems. As a consequence, we argue that ecosystem scientists today also need to address a number of critical challenges and devote new energy and expertise to Modeling the Anthropocene, Operationalizing resilience, and Understanding social-ecological dynamics across scales. This new deep dive into unknown waters requires a number of strategies to be successful. We suggest that marine ecosystem scientists need to actively: Prepare for the unexpected, cross boundaries, and understand our cognitive limitations to further develop the exciting field of marine ecosystem science.

Small-scale fishing communities are increasingly connected to international seafood trade via exports to a growing global market. Understanding how this connectedness impacts local fishery systems, both socially and ecologically, has become a necessary challenge for fisheries governance. Market prices are a potential mechanism by which global market demands are transferred to small-scale fishery actors. In most small-scale fisheries this happens through various traders (intermediaries, middlemen/women or patrons). By financing fishing operations, buying and selling products and transferring market information, traders can actively pass international market signals, such as price, to fishers. How these signals influence fishers' decisions and consequent fishing effort is still poorly understood yet significant for future social-ecological sustainability. The paper uses an economic framed field experiment, in combination with interviews, to shed light on this. It does so in the context of the Philippine patron-client 'suki' arrangement. Over 250 fishers in Concepcion, Iloilo were asked in an economic experiment, to make decisions about fuel loans in light of changing market prices. Interviews with participants and their patrons gathered additional information on relevant contextual variables potentially influencing borrowing. They included fisher characteristics and socio-economic conditions. Contrary to our hypotheses, fishers showed no response in their borrowing behaviour to experimental price changes. Instead, gender and the previous experiment round were predictive of their choice of loans in the experiment. We explore possible reasons for this.